“Law Day, USA 2012″: Loyalty to the State Uber Alles

Barack Obama, who claims the authority to order the execution or indefinite military detention of any U.S. citizen he considers a terrorist, has issued a “Law Day USA 2012” proclamation piously professing his undying devotion to due process:

This year’s Law Day theme, “No Courts, No Justice, No Freedom,” recalls the historic role our courts have played in protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of all Americans. Our courts are the guarantors of civil justice, social order, and public safety, and we must do everything we can to enable their critical work. The courthouse doors must be open and the necessary services must be in place to allow all litigants, judges, and juries to operate efficiently. Likewise, we must ensure that access to justice is not an abstract theory, but a concrete commitment that delivers the promise of counsel and assistance for all who seek it.

Read with a perceptive eye, that decree is a potent indictment of the Obama administration.

The same president who affixed his signature to those words has murdered at least two U.S. citizens – one of them a 16-year-old boy – by way of drone-fired missile strikes. Neither Anwar al-Awlaki nor his teenage son Abdulrahman was every formally accused of a crime, let alone indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced. Their executions were approved by a secretive, anonymous, unaccountable panel, rather than a court or jury of any kind. There was certainly a great deal of “efficiency” in this arrangement – but not so much as a hint or whisper of due process.

In a tortured exercise in sophistry, Attorney General Eric Holder told an audience at Northwestern University Law School that “due process” doesn’t require “judicial process” – a self-serving claim that is impossible to reconcile with Obama’s strident insistence that without the “critical work” of the court system, justice is merely an “abstract theory.”

During congressional testimony on March 7, FBI Director Robert Mueller was asked about Eric Holder’s claim that the president can order the execution of American citizens without judicial process. He artlessly ducked the question by claiming he would “have to go back” and check if that was addressed in administration policy. Mueller has not found the time to report what he has learned.

Rather than being a modest commercial republic ruled by law, the United States is a fully realized imperial regime whose rulers operate on the basis of Lenin’s definition of a “scientific dictatorship”: Power without limit, resting directly on force, restrained by no laws….” The president is not bound by the Constitution or the law; he is an elected dictator whose power is limited only by his imagination and ambition.

“Law Day” was created by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1958 as a joint observance with “Loyalty Day.” This commemoration – which is not an official government holiday – was meant as a counterweight to May Day, or “International Workers Day,” perhaps the holiest date on the revolutionary calendar. According to the 1961 Public Law officially designating May 1 as “Law and Loyalty Day,” the date is intended as a special day of celebration by the people of the United States … in appreciation of their liberties and the reaffirmation of their loyalty to the United States and of their rededication to the ideals of equality and justice under law in their relations with each other and with other countries … and for the cultivation of the respect for law that is so vital to the democratic way of life.”

The true focus of “Law and Loyalty Day” is the unconditional demand for the latter from a government that incessantly violates the former.